We have a Winner!!
Hear, hear, all ye citizens of Wild Magnolia Design and Lovely In Green–we have a contest winner!!
We had many wonderful submissions to our “Creative Post” contest. We were thrilled, humbled, and laughing at all your creative and thoughtful posts about loving WMD, and we thank you all! We’d like to recognize not only the winner, but a couple runners up as well.
Our second runner up is Tobin Photography. Tobin wrote a very creative blog post about his search for a substantial, quality, green-to-the-core album to offer his clients. Expecting to find only green facades or hippie-stitched flimsy books, he shares how he went from on-guard to on-board when he discovered Wild Magnolia Design. He also shared about his own business’ green advocacy–with every wedding he books, he donates funds to help plant 100 trees! That is awesome, Tobin! Thank you for including our products in your green business.
Our first runner up is Brown Butter Photography. We loved their tribute to us in their list of 50 reasons why they love WMD. If you can’t tell how thoughtful and personal the Brown Butter team is from their work and website, this blog post will hit it home. No copying and pasting here–each “why” is written out by them. You can tell they really take the time to get to know not only their clients, but their album company, too! Brown Butter, you make us feel good! Thank you!
And now… the winner of Wild Magnolia Design’s “Most creative post about Wild Magnolia Design Albums” contest is… Pink Hedgehog Photography! If this curious and playful name didn’t tip you off as to their creativity, check out their blog post about us. Photographer and owner, Sam Gomez, created an illustrated story about her search for a beautiful, eco-friendly album. As in her story, “one that wouldn’t stress her planet-friend out.” Her charming illustrations of said stressed-out planet-friend, searching out from the bough of a ship, and her cute doodle of a WMD album made us grin from ear to ear. Her happy moth picture, a nod to our peace silk, warmed our hearts.
Thank you for taking the time to share your story with us–in storybook form! We would like to thank you (in album form)!! 
Warm Flavors action set by {LiG} ~ free download
I’ve been wanting to develop an action set for a while that expressed my personal taste and style in wedding and portrait photos. I constantly find myself attracted to warm, creamy, and sometimes cross-processed photo treatments. With the help and input of several very talented photographers, I finally developed 15 actions in my first set entitled “Warm Flavors”. I wanted to offer for free what previously was not available for free. Some of the actions are intended to be film-like, incorporating a grain layer whose opacity you can adjust to your liking. Some actions are subtle and some are bold; I leave it up to you to play with them and create your own photo artworks. Images below are generously provided by Sharyn Frenkel Photography. Anyway, without further introduction, I give you Warm Flavors!
 
5 greener options!
I am always on the lookout for ways photographers can make their studio greener. I believe presentation is a true art form, and done properly will highly increase your chances of booking clients. Putting together the right combination of items can be tricky, but if you look hard enough you will find many items to offer your brides and families that are green and look great together. Tonight I did a quick moodboard of products readily available that you can use to green up your studio while still looking fabulous! Here they are:
1 ~ These beautiful reclaimed barnwood frames from Etsy are beautiful and affordable! You can find all sorts of sizes and finishes here.
2 ~ These hemp DVD cases by Loktah are beautiful and rustic. Highly recommended for a green wedding! I truly believe presentation is extremely important when you are delivering images to your clients. It shows brides you really care about the details, which goes a long way in getting word-of-mouth recommendations. Check them out here.
3 ~ The Wild Magnolia Design Willow album. At 18″ x 6″, these special albums make an amazing impression on clients and fit the aspect ratio of your camera perfectly. Available here.
4 ~ Highly renewable Pinto Lokta paper sheets available in small or large quantities. Lokta paper is made from mulberry bushes, which is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world. If you do any kind of wrapping presentation yourself, why not use one of their soothing earthy papers as a fantastic final touch to a delivered product! Available here. I personally recommend using raffia instead of traditional ribbon, too!
5 ~ My Driftwood branding pack in The Shoppe Designs, printed on green felt paper by ProDPI. Features a full set of marketing materials with a stunning, custom-looking design. Get it here!
Happy green, everyone!!
A lovely green way to keep your clients cool
This is another fabulous idea I got from Marizon. We were sitting down to dinner last Friday when Marizon brought out a gorgeous glass pitcher full of goodies soaking in ice-cold water. I poured myself a glass, and quickly realized how incredibly delicious this is! It is so good, I had to share it on Lovely in Green immediately.
I know a lot of you live in places where it gets hot, hot, hot in the summer! I can only imagine how expensive it might be when you’re meeting with clients during the warm wedding season in your studio, home, or wherever else you do it – and have to offer refreshments on a regular basis. This is the perfect solution to the “honey, what should I offer Jane and Bill when they come over tomorrow to review their proofs?”. It’s very inexpensive, very easy to make, very green, and VERY delicious!
First, if you don’t already have a clear-glass pitcher, get going to your local thrift store and find one. I would say that glass pitchers have to be one of the most common items I’ve seen at a thrift store – I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding one for under $5. If you have one already around the house, even better! I recommend clear class because it makes for a very beautiful display.
Secondly, go to your local grocery and buy some lemons. Josh and I live in a relatively high-income area, so lemons aren’t the cheapest things you’ll find (I spent 50 cents per lemon today), but I’ve seen them at Trader Joe’s and other less expensive groceries in larger bags for as low as 10 cents a lemon. After you’ve bagged your lemons (I would suggest 2 lemons per gallon of water), head to the herbs area and grab yourself a bunch of mint. The mint I got today was $1.49 for a really big bunch. I also highly recommend growing the mint yourself in a pot. It’s super easy to grow and looks great (when contained properly!). Mint is actually a weed in most areas, and because it’s so abundant I would say that it’s a highly renewable resource!
Lastly, you’ll need water and ice. Regular tap water will do if you live in an area with tasty tap, but I used filtered water from the fridge. Regular ice cubes are fine too… if you wanted to get really fancy, you could freeze lemon zest and mint shavings in the ice… but that’s not necessary, and if you’re in a hurry you might just want to use straight up ice.
Slice the lemon (my pitcher is a half-gallon, so half a lemon is plenty) into circles about 1/3″ thick. Wash the mint off thoroughly, but otherwise leave as-is. Put the lemon and mint in the pitcher, then add the water, to prevent overflow. You can add a few mint sprigs on top, too, just to be pretty. Let stand for 15 to 30 minutes to allow the flavors to blend, then add the ice! The result is totally delicious. For under $3, you can have a gallon of delicious lemon-mint icewater that’s going to be a much bigger hit with your clients than soda or regular juice! Yum!
I took some photos of my pitcher today and applied a photoshop action that’s part of a set I’ll be sharing with you later on this week. I also snuck in a Wild Magnolia album in there, because no photo consultation is truly green without a Wild Magnolia book on the table!!! Enjoy ~
Who likes it vintage?? ~ free download
Hi everyone! When I first started WMD, a lot of photographers asked me if I could extra-vintageify (what term would I call that… Victorianize? Like a photo from the Victorian era?) their pictures. It’s a look that some of the very very high end photographers (I’m not going to mention any names but I’m sure you can guess) are using as a reason to charge mega money for wedding bookings, workshops, and design tools like actions and overlays. I had a lot of fun repeating this look it for clients, although it was pretty time consuming. Each photo could take me up to 30 minutes to transform into a standalone piece, using every trick in the book I had with Photoshop. After a while, I started developing faster tools and techniques to do this, and today I’m going to share some of it with you! I created a .PSD file for you to play with to your heart’s content as a starting place for transforming your images into dirty and beautiful artworks. I plan to post many more Photoshop files in the same genre soon, so keep coming back for more.
The best photos to start with for this are ones that don’t have a lot of stuff going on in them. Macro ring shots, facial closeups, and objects with clean backgrounds make for the best results. One of my friends and clients, Sharyn Frenkel of Sharyn Frenkel Photography, was kind enough to let me use her pictures for this demo. I selected a few that I thought would really transform well for this post:
Using lots of overlays, color curves, doodle scratches, and other assorted adjustment layers, I developed a Photoshop file that is available for you to download. It looks like this:
Lots of layers, which means lots of control for you to adjust the look of the final result. I did the hard work… your part is easy! Just take your favorite photo (for best results, use something that’s already been color corrected and touched up to a reasonable extent) and insert it above the “background” layer. You’ll instantly see all of my texture and adjustment layers at work, and you can start fine-tuning what you want.
Play with every layer. Turn them on and off, change the brightness/contrast and selective color options at the top. Mess with the textures; desaturate them, saturate them, whatever you want to do. I can’t give you a step-by-step because there is no hard science on how this should look; it’s up to you to match the distress and color shifts to your individual photo. Get creative. I gave you the tools, and here’s what you can do with them:
